Pioneers in Science and Technology Series: Herbert (Herb) York

PIONEERS IN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY SERIES
ORAL HISTORY OF DR. HERBERT YORK
Interviewed by Clarence Larson
Filmed by Jane Larson
November 29, 1985
Transcribed by Jordan Reed
MR. LARSON: …doing some in the computer field, and physics, Charlie Townes in physics. So it’s been a variety, and then I made arrangements with the University of California at Berkeley, MIT…
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MR. LARSON: …library. You haven’t pressed the…
MRS. LARSON: I have. I just did.
MR. LARSON: You just did. So all right, we can start. If it’s all right with you we’ll go ahead.
DR. YORK: Ok.
MR. LARSON: To just identify the tape, it won’t appear in the…
DR. YORK: Sure.
MR. LARSON: …tape, I just say a few words and then I say, “Please proceed.” Then I would like to have you sort of give some of your early background which leads you into the field of science. That’s always a part I have found very interesting in every film. Then going into your highlights of your career, both scientific and administrative. So we essentially get a complete, as though it’s autobiographical film. So, fine. You all ready, Jane? Very good. Well, today, November 29, 1985, we are privileged to introduce Dr. Herb York whose pioneer work in physics has spanned many of the projects of decisive importance to our nation. His many awards would take too much time to describe without impinging on his valuable time. So I will simply ask you to please proceed, Dr. York.
DR. YORK: Ok and you would like me to start…
MR. LARSON: With the early background.
DR. YORK: With early background, ok. I was born and raised in Rochester, New York and my father was a railroad man as his father had been before and I had a fairly happy, but not terribly eventful childhood. But I got interested in science very early. My earliest memories involve wondering about numbers and things like that.
MR. LARSON: Do you remember about what age you were, thinking about it?
DR. YORK: Kindergarten, I bugged people about what comes after a billion and a trillion, and other trivial things like that.
MR. LARSON: Other powers of ten.
DR. YORK: I was about eight or nine when an uncle of my father happened to give me two books, one of them was called Astronomy for Amateurs and it was by Camille Flammarion, a great French Astronomer.
MR. LARSON: Yes, a very famous book which has persisted to this day as a matter of fact.
DR. YORK: The particular one I referred to?
MR. LARSON: No, the Flammarion book of astronomy, we bought one about five years ago.
DR. YORK: Well this particular book is Astronomy for Amateurs in English.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. YORK: And the French title, which happily I didn’t know at the time, was Astronomy for Women. If I had known that, I might not have been willing to read it.
MR. LARSON: Be careful of any sexist remarks.
DR. YORK: That’s simply the fact. I’m talking about a period 50 years ago, more than 50 years ago. The other book was on crack, quack medicine, having to do with the treatment of disease by color. There was nothing to it except a lot of funny testimonials and so, but it had a beautiful spectrum with a lot of lines in it. They frown over the spectrum of the sun. But the book Astronomy for Amateurs, I just glommed onto with enormous interest and I still remember the style of the book. The chapter on the sun would start out with words like, “Oh, great globe of day, oh, life giving orb.”
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. YORK: Whole series of very dramatic statements like that, then followed by data about the sun. The sun is 860,000 miles in diameter. The moon is 2,200 miles in diameter and so forth. All qualitative, all nonmathematical except the last chapter which dealt with the trigonometric means for measuring the distance of the planets, which I couldn’t understand at all at the time, but the, all the rest of it was marvelously general and qualitative and very dramatic. I enjoyed it very much and read it several times, along about the same time I was reading Tarzan and things of that sort. I didn’t do particularly well in science in grammar school and high school. I didn’t particularly like the courses. So I entered the University of Rochester with the idea of majoring in engineering because the only professional man my father knew was an engineer. He was a chemical engineer at Eastman Kodak named Garson Meyer and when it came time to go to college, it always seemed obvious I was going to go to college. I mean it was my father’s idea that I should and it just was a part of growing up, the assumption that I would. He was determined that I would not be a railroad man. So, the question was what would I do in college at the University of Rochester. I went to visit Mr. Meyer who was head of one of the chemical engineering laboratories at Kodak and he seemed to enjoy what he was doing so I went, majored in chemical engineering that first year.
MR. LARSON: Well you joined very distinguished people in that. People like [Eugene] Wigner, [Edward] Teller, we were talking to Dr. [William] Fowler at Cal Tech the other day. They all started out in engineering.
DR. YORK: I didn’t stay long in engineering, only one year because when I got to the University of Rochester which is a very fine place and for which I have enormously positive feelings. I feel very fortunate to have gone there. It was a good university, an extraordinarily good university in a small town. I went there because I lived there and for no other reason.
MR. LARSON: What year did you enter college?
DR. YORK: I entered in 1939 and that’s important with regard to the rest of my career because the war in Europe started about a week or two before I entered.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. YORK: So that war and the things that flowed from it have dominated my entire career. But while there, in my first year I made a lot of discoveries of things I’ve never heard about before, graduate education, Ph.D.’s, teaching assistants who were graduate research assistants, and so forth, I discovered that they enjoyed what they were doing. For the first time ever I started thinking about college or school generally not as a means to an end, that is to say to get a better job, but as an end in itself. I discovered that there were people who were doing chemistry as an end in itself rather than a means to a job. So I switched very quickly to chemistry because engineering didn’t have that kind of people. They were all in chemistry where they had people like that at Rochester. Then in the course of becoming a chemistry student I had to take physics and I discovered I liked physics even better. So I met some of the people who were very important to me in those years were Viki [Victor] Weisskopf and Syd Barnes and Joe Platt.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. YORK: All of whom were professors there. And then as I began to move through the sophomore and junior years, they started leaving for these projects in various places. Joe Platt went to MIT to work on radar. Viki Weisskopf went off first to Chicago and then to Los Alamos, although I didn’t know it was Los Alamos at the time, to work on, what was obviously the atomic bomb project and finally I, myself joined, eagerly joined this flood of people leaving education and going to war. Fortunately for me I was recruited by an agent of Ernest Lawrence to come to Berkeley. So I arrived in Berkeley in the spring of 1943, to join the Manhattan Project.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes. Well that gives a very fine introduction. And of course you mentioned along the line several very important people who were important on both the electromagnetic project and at Los Alamos and so on.
DR. YORK: You must of known Syd Barnes well yourself.
MR. LARSON: Yes, of course. Syd Barnes was my next door neighbor in Oak Ridge.
DR. YORK: In Oak Ridge. Well I helped him build a swimming pool at his house at Oak Ridge.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes. I remember that.
DR. YORK: He had those two delightful daughters and a son there at the time.
MR. LARSON: He did work on the cyclotron at Rochester.
DR. YORK: The cyclotron at Rochester was one of several cyclotrons, each of which is the second cyclotron built after the ones at Berkeley. There were ones at Princeton and I guess Cornell, I guess built all about the same time and the, I had the opportunity to work on the cyclotron at Rochester. Not in getting it going, but in using it and my, one of my early paid jobs was running it to produce radioactive materials for use in radiobiology and medicine.
MR. LARSON: Yes, well fine. I remember personally myself working with you indirectly on the receivers for the U-235 and the so called Beta stage and those were very exciting days.
DR. YORK: Well that was after, that was an outgrowth of going to Berkeley. I went to Berkeley and worked on the whole calutron project, met Lawrence fairly early but I worked directly at first for Frank Oppenheimer and Fred Schmidt then later for Eugene Gardner on the receivers for the calutrons as you said. Then you recall that the first attempt to start up the calutrons at Oak Ridge in the fall of ’43 didn’t work out. So Lawrence arranged to transfer, I suppose, about 100 of us from Berkeley to Oak Ridge to participate in actually getting the whole plant going. So in early ’44, that is what I was primarily doing, was just one of the big group there to get the calutrons going and we did succeed. Within that project I concentrated on the design of the receivers and worked particularly with those questions that had to do with the tradeoffs between quantity and quality. And because I was working on the tradeoff between quality and quantity, I was one of the very few people at Oak Ridge who had any idea about…
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DR. YORK: …I remember telling Lawrence that I could do a better job if he would tell me how it did tradeoff, how the critical mass depended on the concentration. So a few weeks later when he had been to Los Alamos, he came back and gave me just a tiny scrap of paper with about four pairs of numbers on it which represented the curve that connected these two quantities and then I optimized the design of the receivers to take that into account.
MR. LARSON: Yes. That’s very interesting and very important there. I remember [Emilio] Segre was one of the men who helped work out the critical mass...
DR. YORK: Yes. I didn’t know Segre until the war was over.
MR. LARSON: …optimizing, as they say, the enrichment necessary because there was a tradeoff there on quantity. If you had one without the other, it didn’t do very good. So very interesting there. Well of course the net result is your projects were successful and then what was your next move then after Oak Ridge.
DR. YORK: As soon as the war was over, I hastened back to Berkeley to become one of the junior employees at Lawrence’s Berkeley Laboratory, which was a somewhat reduced version of the wartime laboratory. I was fortunate enough to be one of the ones he kept on and became at the same time a graduate student. So I became a graduate student at Berkeley and a researcher, or a junior researcher in the laboratory. First engaged, my first job was operating the 60 inch cyclotron. Again, just producing radioactive materials for other people and doing it mostly at night shift, and even owl shift while trying to go to school during the day time. But after about a year of that I got first into health physics when they were turning on the big cyclotron, the question was where is the radiation and how much is there when the machine is working and so I joined with some others with making measurements of that. Burt Moyer was my first boss in that regard, but that didn’t look like a very exciting long-term thing to be doing, so I quite early worked myself into an arrangement whereby I was doing experiments with the beams produced by the cyclotron. It was a time that could never be reproduced because here was the biggest machine in the world at that time and I was a graduate student with some times as much as 25 percent of the total time for weeks on end just devoted to experiments that I was doing, scattering neutrons off of protons, doing other kinds of neutron-nuclei interactions and a little bit later doing the first work, the observations of the neutral meson and nowadays you have to be a full professor and join all the other people in order to do such work, but it was just a golden age where we students could get the biggest and most powerful machine in the world to ourselves.
MR. LARSON: Yes, that’s an amazing period in high-energy physics because as you say, you implied you see a paper and hierarchy physics, there is likely to be 25 names.
DR. YORK: And none of them are graduate students.
MR. LARSON: Yes.
DR. YORK: Well I got to know Lawrence well. I had come to know him during the war and I liked him and he seemed to like me and when I would work in the evenings at the Berkeley Laboratory, he would often come in after supper and he generally toured the laboratory, must have toured it once a week when he was around and he would always stop by and ask me what I was doing. Then I would tell him briefly what I was doing, he would look at the oscilloscopes. You know there are a lot of oscilloscopes there with pulses on them and I would be sitting there taking data. It was long before there was automatic recording of data, or automatic data reduction. And I would tell him, he would give me a big smile, a pat on the head so to speak, and then go on to someone else. I recall one Christmas Eve when I was there working on a project that he in fact had put me on. These other things I am speaking of were mainly what I started myself, but he remained interested in defense-oriented work and he had a project that was designed to be an alternative way of separating uranium isotopes involving time separation and a pulse device. I was working on that and we were somehow crowded for time and I was up there early on a Christmas Eve, Sybil was at home with one child and he came by to see how we were doing. Then he said, “I’m going up to the singlotron to see what’s going on there.” he went up, came back, you know, five minutes later with this dismayed look on his face. He said, “There’s no one there.” (Laughter) Which wasn’t a surprise to me and I went home myself shortly afterwards.
MR. LARSON: That’s a very interesting, interesting piece of memorabilia connected with those days and typical of a E.O. Lawrence experience. You were doing graduate work at the same time, and so you got your Ph.D. then at Berkeley.
DR. YORK: Yeah, in about ’49, after getting back to Berkeley, a little less than four years and then I stayed on briefly as a professor and a post-doctoral researcher. In those days there were all kinds of job offers coming in to all of us at Berkeley. I got my share of those and Ernest would bring them himself, but he would always encourage me not to take them and I didn’t want to. I liked it very much at Berkeley and wanted to stay right there because it was the center of the world and I just wanted a good front seat on the center of the world. But after a couple of years, well, I got my Ph.D. in April of ’49 and that August was the first Russian atomic bomb and Ernest with the help of [Luis] Alvarez and a few others, was anxious to sort of remobilize as I’m sure other people have said and so he began looking for ways to involve himself. He made trips himself and Luis made trips to Los Alamos to talk with the people there, [Edward] Teller, [Norris] Bradbury and the others and they then suggested that Bradner and I should go down and see if there was anything we could do, Hugh Bradner, to see if there was anything that we at Berkeley could do to help with the hydrogen bomb program that was then just blossoming at Los Alamos.
MR. LARSON: Essentially the decision had been made to go ahead…
DR. YORK: Yes, by Truman.
MR. LARSON: So that you were right there in the forefront.
DR. YORK: That’s right. The decision was made by January of ’50, and I was there in the spring of ’50, looking into the question of what it is Berkeley could do to help on that project. Lawrence was following his own line and building the, and looking into the question of building a reactor to make a lot of tritium and then building a, actually starting a project to build a large machine to produce the neutrons by brute force that would then be used to make tritium, plutonium or whatever, but he also sent Bradner and me to Los Alamos to see what else we could do. We discovered that they could use help on so called diagnostic experiments that is making observations at the microsecond that the explosions take place. So Brad and I set up a project of equipment and a team of people which included Harold Brown incidentally and at Berkeley we designed this apparatus and the network of recording instruments and so forth. We set some of it up at Livermore which was already being used by Lawrence for his big accelerator project, production accelerator, but mainly we worked in Berkeley. Then we transported all this equipment out to Enewetak [Atoll] and set it up on an island out there to observe the first large explosion that involved a thermonuclear reaction. A device called George that a group of people at Los Alamos, Teller, [Enrico] Fermi, [John] Von Neumann and others had been busily engaged in working out. It wasn’t the direct ancestor of today’s hydrogen bomb in the design sense, but it sort of was a place for checking out ideas and calculations that later led to the mainline development of the Super.
MR. LARSON: Yes. This involved essentially liquid hydrogen, tritium…
DR. YORK: It involved a very small amount of liquid neutronium and tritium, which was ignited by a very large fission explosion designed to produce enough energy and heat to make that happen. So it was a tiny thermonuclear explosion in the presence of a very large fission explosion.
MR. LARSON: But enough for diagnostics.
DR. YORK: Enough to make these diagnostic measurements. We measured the temperature under which the explosion and reactions took place. Other people measured the rate of the reaction itself by observing the neutrons that are produced. We were successful in doing that experiment but that meant that I was then the house expert at Berkeley about what was going on at Los Alamos.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. YORK: So then when the question of a second laboratory became more and more heated, I mean Teller had been promoting this idea for quite some time, one of the commissioners happened to call Lawrence just before New Year’s 1952 to ask him what he thought. Murray, Thomas Murray, he had been in touch before, but I wasn’t aware of it. On New Year’s Day there was a party at Carl Hemold’s house at which Lawrence and I met and Ernest said come and see me at your, you know, earliest convenience. So, I was all eager to see him, and a couple days later I went in and he said, “Should there be a second laboratory?”
MR. LARSON: Oh yes. That’s a very interesting historical incident there.
DR. YORK: Right I said…
MR. LARSON: No, can we fix that date roughly?
DR. YORK: The date that he said to come him see him was January 1, 1952. The day I actually saw him must have been within the first week, but I visited his office on, you know, the next working day is what it amounts to, whatever that was, at Berkeley. So, I said I would look into it. I made a series of trips to Los Alamos where I already knew the people, Teller and the others, Bradbury to visit with them on this subject. I went, well Teller was at Chicago by then, so I went up there to visit with him. I went to Washington where I visited people in the Pentagon, Jimmy Doolittle, Benny Shraver, people in the Atomic Energy Commission, Gordon Dean, Thomas Murray and always talking with these people about the connection between the hydrogen bomb and national security, what it was that was needed, what kind of program and effort was needed. After a fairly short time, this I don’t know the date, but sometime in February, lets say, of ’52, I told Lawrence that I thought it was a good idea. He, you will recall was ill that spring. I mean he had colitis for some years, but he had a special problem with it during the spring of ’52, so he spent a lot of time away.
MR. LARSON: Yes.
DR. YORK: So I would only see him occasionally and whenever I saw him, he would encourage me to make plans for a second laboratory.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. YORK: So I drew up plans for doing diagnostic work, for doing controlled thermonuclear work, basic physics, and then in addition, developing nuclear weapons there at Livermore. It wasn’t obvious that that would be part of the whole package. That’s of course what Teller wanted, but it’s not necessarily what we were going to do. Finally we decided we were going to do the whole package, take the whole enchilada, build a new laboratory at Livermore that would do all of those things, including weapons design. Then we started recruiting and during the late spring and summer of 1952 I recruited about 20 physicists who would join us out there. Teller was off and on, he blew hot and cold on the project. He wanted a second laboratory, but he wasn’t really quite convinced that this one we were going to build out there was the one he wanted. So at one point he did in fact announce that he was not going to come and at the urging of the Washington authorities, Ernest and I did what we could to talk Teller back into sticking with the project. We were going to go ahead with it anyway and he did finally agree and so on September 1952 with around 100 people we started the Livermore Laboratory out there at the site where it still is today. Among those were some people who have been very influential in the times following that, in particular, I think particularly of Harold Brown, but Duane Sewell who was the engineering manager from the beginning became Assistant Secretary of Energy for National Security Affairs.
MR. LARSON: Yes, of course I know him. He was a former student of mine, as an undergraduate.
DR. YORK: Is that so?
MR. LARSON: So I’ve known him for a number of years.
DR. YORK: Well, in addition, Johnny Foster became one of the other secretaries of defense and Jerry Johnson who joined us soon after, became the assistant to the secretary for Atomic Energy. So that group, that initial group produced a lot of people who then went on to have a lot of influence and say in what would happen in the future.
MR. LARSON: Those were very exciting days. As a matter of fact, I believe I visited you some place around late ’52 or ’53 when you were just getting started. I remember the difficulties you were having with recruitment at that time because…
DR. YORK: We managed to make it.
MR. LARSON: …it was way out there in the boondocks so to speak.
DR. YORK: That’s right. We were about 50 miles from Berkeley and that was far enough so that the distance was a negative factor and a lot of the people declined to live in Livermore. Edward Teller never moved out there, always lived in Berkeley. Harold Brown lived half way in between, but Johnny Foster, Jerry Johnson, Duane Sewell and I all lived right in Livermore, you know a mile, two miles from the Laboratory.
MR. LARSON: So that was, as things went along then, you started developing the Laboratory as an integrated and well-rounded laboratory essentially.
DR. YORK: But with a focus on nuclear weapons.
MR. LARSON: Yes.
DR. YORK: But with activities in other closely related areas, specifically for the purpose of making it a more interesting and well-rounded place. We had some troubles at first with the devices that we produced and tested, but we managed to just go right through those difficulties and after a couple of years developed a very good track record of performance in that particular field.
MR. LARSON: How many of those developments are not, are declassified or not classified at this time that you participated in?
DR. YORK: Well the majority of things are not declassified, that is to say there is certain information about them, certain explosions took place on certain dates and it’s also publicly established that for instance the first Polaris warheads were developed at Livermore and certain of the nuclear artillery. There are things like that, but none of the details of, none of the advances per say are all still classified. In addition to that, we did do some peripheral activities. We worked on nuclear rockets, nuclear ramjet, neither of those worked out. We worked on controlled thermonuclear, particularly, well in those days solely the magnetic bottle-type of nuclear fusion. The inertially confined fusion didn’t start until long after I had left. And the mirror machines, which are one of the mainline approaches to the fusion problem were adopted, were, that’s what we started with when we started the program at Livermore. I started the program at Livermore, inspired by the programs at Princeton that [Lyman] Spitzer had and the one that [James] Tuck had at Los Alamos, plus this strange information that was showing in the press about success in this area in Argentina by this strange man [Ronald] Richter.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes, that is a very fascinating story, how much that spurred on the activity.
DR. YORK: Spitzer’s program was stimulated by that. I mean, he gives it credit for making him first start thinking about it.
MR. LARSON: Yes.
DR. YORK: But it goes beyond that. I was in the Soviet Union 10, 15 years after these days we’re talking about, talking with Galivan, who was one of [Igor] Kurchatov’s principal assistants, and one of the originators of the Soviet controlled nuclear program. He said that they were getting ready to start up such a program in 1951, ’52, when they read about the Argentina, the claimed successes of the Argentinian and they used those claims as one of the arguments for getting money out of the Bureau to start one of those programs. So the Soviet program, like the American program owes really quite a bit in terms of stimulus to these false reports coming out of Argentina.
MR. LARSON: I can remember talking to [Henry] Smyth who was a commissioner at that time about the Richter development and I said, “Sounds like thermonuclear is to be.” He said, “Well several other people have mentioned it.”
DR. YORK: Well, that’s what he was claiming.
MR. LARSON: So…
DR. YORK: I now have a book out in my office in Spanish which is devoted to that entire episode that is full of details about it that I have never seen anywhere else.
MR. LARSON: That’s a very interesting piece of history there and that’s why I wanted you to elaborate a little bit. This has been very helpful.
DR. YORK: Yes. In my new institute that I am now running, we have a young woman named Yetal Goldman, a political scientist at UCLA, she’s one of our graduate fellows, dissertation fellow, she is doing research on proliferation in Argentina and Brazil. She has lived there and is of course a fluent Spanish and Portuguese speaker and it was she who brought me in touch with this latest work. I was telling her about Richter, his influence and she has given me a copy of this book. If you read Spanish, I could even loan it to you.
MR. LARSON: No, I’m not fluent.
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DR. YORK: Sybil, telephone man is coming in the back!
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DR. YORK: It seems informal enough to be all right.
MR. LARSON: Oh yeah. When we reproduce the copies, we just cut those out.
DR. YORK: Oh my.
MR. LARSON: So…
DR. YORK: That’s the best part.
MR. LARSON: That’s, no problem.
DR. YORK: If the telephone man has to come through here, we’ll have to interrupt, but...
MR. LARSON: All right. Fine.
DR. YORK: That’s why you had the trouble calling us. We have two telephone numbers and about six or seven telephones…
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MRS. LARSON: Go ahead.
DR. YORK: We all right? The dogs can get out right over there if they want to, so we don’t have to worry about it.
MR. LARSON: Well, very good, fine. We’ll just proceed.
DR. YORK: Ok.
MR. LARSON: All right, we’re rolling. Where are we?
MRS. LARSON: What were you talking about?
DR. YORK: We were talking about Richter…
MR. LARSON: We had almost finished Richter I believe. All right well, then your work at Livermore then, of course followed up on all of these various areas of approach to control thermonuclear work and as, then of course you were proceeding on the broad aspects of the applications of Livermore to developing nuclear weapons.
DR. YORK: Because of that I was deeply involved as a consultant to the various military groups that were using nuclear weapons, so were some of the others, but I was probably more deeply involved than anyone else at Livermore. I was a member of two committees chaired by Von Neumann. One was the Nuclear Panel of the Air Force Science Advisory Board and the other was a special committee reporting to the Secretary of the Air Force and Secretary of Defense advising on the ICBM [Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles] and related long range missiles, the sea launched missiles and the IRBMs [Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles] as well. That got me closely connected with people like George Kistiakowsky and Jerry Weesner whom I had not known during the war and then I was part of one of the advisors to the Garther Panel which met just before Sputnik and through that I met Jim Killian and the net result of all of that was that when Eisenhower decided to form a science advisory panel reporting directly to him after Sputnik as part of the American response to Sputnik, he asked Killian to be the chairman and Killian invited me to be one of the new members. So that got me into the White House.
MR. LARSON: So you were really then one of the original President’s Science Advisory Committee.
DR. YORK: My particular job was to work on the reorganization both in terms of structure and in terms of program of the American space program.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. YORK: Both the military space program and the civilian space program. So I was a part of a small group of three or four people who worked out the plans for the creation of NASA on the one hand to run the civil space program, the original rough plans for having man in space, going to the moon and all of that, and then simultaneously on the military side for the reconnaissance satellites and all of those things that the military uses. That occupied me essentially from December ’57, right after Sputnik to about March of ’58. I was a part of the whole White House team that planned these things. Then in March ’58, they sold me across the river to the Pentagon where I became the chief scientist of ARPA [Advanced Research Projects Agency] whose principal function was to develop the military space program. You can come through.
MRS. YORK: Oh.
DR. YORK: They can just edit the tape, just please don’t knock the lights, that’s all. Do you want to go ahead?
MR. LARSON: Well, fine.
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Yeah, the lights going.
MR. LARSON: Very good. We’re on camera again. Very good, fine. We’ll just continue then. So as, while you were there as first on the Presidential Science Advisory Committee, you were still at Livermore, but then you immediately went over as chief scientist…
DR. YORK: I was on the Livermore payroll, so to speak, until I was assigned to ARPA, but from December 1 to about March or April 1, I didn’t spend, I spent very little time at Livermore, but I was not replaced, but just by an acting director. Then when it was determined that I was going to be staying for a long time in Washington, Mark Mills probably would have been my successor as director of Livermore, but he was killed at about that time.
MR. LARSON: I remember that very sad accident.
DR. YORK: Yeah, a helicopter crash out in Utah. So Edward Teller decided that he would try his hand at it and nobody could stop him.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes. Fine. So Edward Teller succeeded you then.
DR. YORK: Yes and was director for over a year at which point Harold Brown became director.
MR. LARSON: So well, fine. What things were you directly involved in then as the director of ARPA?
DR. YORK: I was chief scientist of ARPA and Roy Johnson was director. He was from the white coats part of General Electric and was, they brought him in because they wanted a person who looked like an executive running ARPA and I was in my middle thirty’s at the time and although some people wanted Killian and people in the White House wanted me to be the director, the compromise they worked out was me as chief scientist and Roy Johnson as director. What we did, the main part of the work at ARPA was to establish, really to reestablish the American and military space program and to do certain things for the civilian space program as well, in the interim period before NASA was established. Sybil are you… to do these, we for example took the initiative for getting the big so called Nova engine going. It was, or F-1 engine, it was a rocket engine that would generate one million pounds of thrust. It’s only use eventually was in connection with the Apollo program. But on the military side, there already were a, there were some programs going, there were a lot of ideas for new ones, we made minor modifications in the ongoing programs. They really were much better than the public had been lead to believe by the press. And then we introduced a few new programs on top of that and essentially got the program in hand. There was inter-service rivalry and a spread of authority over too many different hands was in fact causing problems within the program and making us miss some opportunities and do some things unnecessarily, expensively and so on. So there was a certain amount of rationalization going on and remodeling which ARPA did during that first year. In addition to that we started a number of projects under the heading we called Defender which was a program whose purpose was to develop, to explore the more advanced forms of anti-ballistic missile.
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MR. LARSON: Ready to go again?
DR. YORK: The little red light.
MR. LARSON: All right, well fine. We’re coming along very nicely. Well with regard to that, the contributions of ARPA at the time, let’s see, I believe it was about that time that ARPA became very involved in developing advanced computers which proved to be…
DR. YORK: That was a little later.
MR. LARSON: That was a little later then...
DR. YORK: Yes. We didn’t get into computers when I was there. We were satellites and missile defense, were the two main lines, we had some minor lines of developing fuels for solid rockets and we, but we did institute, you remind me, another national program during that period which has become very important, that was a program in materials development.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes. Of course that was a very important program…
DR. YORK: That is still going on.
MR. LARSON: …that ARPA started, it has led to tremendous developments of materials.
DR. YORK: Yeah, but one of the satellites we introduced for example, one of the space programs we introduced was one called Vella, which is the satellite developed to detect nuclear tests from space and it also by accident opened up the field now known as gamma ray astronomy because those same satellites detected natural bursts of gamma radiation which were similar to the kind of radiation we were expecting to detect from clandestine nuclear explosions or from a loud nuclear explosion.
MR. LARSON: Well I believe that the data from that has been very important in astrophysics.
DR. YORK: But mainly the Vella program was a whole series of instruments space-based, but ground-based as well, whose purpose was to monitor nuclear tests anywhere in the world, which is something of interest for general intelligence reasons, but it’s of even greater interest with arms control.
MR. LARSON: What year did that become operational?
DR. YORK: The early ‘60’s. We started in the period 1958, ’59. I don’t really know when it became operational, but sometime in the early 60’s.
MR. LARSON: Well, fine. That was certainly, you were involved in the starting of some very important programs and of course I believe the name of ARPA has been changed.
DR. YORK: It’s now DARPA. It’s got a D on the front meaning Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
MR. LARSON: It has led to certainly advancing science of some very important military, but it has some substantial civilian off-shoots.
DR. YORK: Yeah and as you said, in later years it has been very heavily involved as one of the prime movers in certain advances in the computer field.
MR. LARSON: Well, fine. How long did you stay then in the field, so far as ARPA…
DR. YORK: I was chief scientist of ARPA for only about eight months.
MR. LARSON: Oh is that right?
DR. YORK: But then as another part of the organization of the National, you know, National Administration of Technology, they created this position called Director of Research Defense and Engineering. That’s a generic assistant secretary of defense but with a different name. The job was open, I mean after the Defense Reorganization Act of 1958 was passed, that was part of it, the job was open and they were looking for people and finally in December, Secretary [Neil] McElroy said the President and I would like you to take this position. I didn’t know that most Assistant Secretaries never do see the President, but I already knew him because I had been working in the White House. So I said Fine, I’ll talk with the President about it. And McElroy with a big smile and without a pause turned around and picked up the white telephone on the table behind him and made a date for me to see the President the next morning. So I went over and we talked about it and it was a very pleasurable experience for me. The President said that you were my candidate all along, he said, but they wanted somebody older and more distinguished. But at any rate they did offer me the job and I accepted it promptly and so I became the Director of Defense Research and Engineering at the end of 1958.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. YORK: That was rather awkward for Roy Johnson because I had been working for him up to that point and now the relationship was reversed. And there was a little difficulty over that which we did work out because as usual in bureaucratic arrangements there is a lot of contradictions and the boiler plate and his job description said he reported to the Secretary of Defense. My job description said that I was responsible for all research and development in engineering in the entire Department of Defense. Those were contradictory but what was finally worked out was fairly simple. I did in fact review his program the same as I reviewed everybody else’s programs, Army, Navy, and Air Force, approved them or disapproved them, as my staff and I decided. He did indeed in the administrative sense, he reported to the Secretary of Defense.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes. Very interesting administrative obligations.
DR. YORK: Yes, but then we had further trouble because the ARPA people were gung-ho for military man in space and it was the President’s view and it was my view that there was no foreseeable need for a military man in space. I think history has won me out on that, but the big man in space program was part of the civil space agency, NASA, it belonged with them. There were a lot of contradictions because the Department of Defense was developing, they had the money and the responsibility for the biggest boosters, the biggest rocket engines and the agency actually developing them was the Army Ballistic Agency with [Wernher] Von Braun but NASA had the responsibility for using them so to speak for the programs that would need them. So, I then began a rearrangement. I then pursued as Director of Defense Research and Engineering a reorganizational plan that ultimately led to Von Braun being transferred to NASA, the Army Ballistic Missile Agency facilities that Von Braun controlled also being transferred to NASA and the responsibility for the big rockets, the Nova, the Saturn 1-B, and the Saturn 1-5, that ultimately led to the Apollo, all those should be transferred from the Department of Defense to NASA and then those other things that ARPA was doing that were military satellites, reconnaissance and so on, I decided that now that things had been rearranged and the programs were now going well, they should be transferred back to the Air Force. So one of my acts as director of defense research and engineering was to take virtually all the entire ARPA space program and give the big booster part of it to NASA and the military satellite part to the Air Force, leaving ARPA with almost nothing, in the way of space programs. That caused a certain additional friction between me and Johnson and the other people at ARPA and between me and the Army people as well.
MR. LARSON: Well it seemed a very logical and efficient way for operating.
DR. YORK: Yes. The way it has worked out as I see it, the way it has worked out confirms my views. That’s when the heater downstairs goes out.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes. No problem.
DR. YORK: No. So the biggest thing I did as DDRE in that first year was to make the last and final rearrangement in the way the United States went about its space program.
MR. LARSON: Well that’s, let’s see, what year again was that?
DR. YORK: 1959.
MR. LARSON: 1959, that all was administratively straightened out with regard to what was NASA and what was the Army…
DR. YORK: And what was the Air Force…
MR. LARSON: And what was ARPA. That was quite a thing to untangle.
DR. YORK: It was bloody at times. It was while McElroy was Secretary of Defense.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes. At that time, was Keith Glennan in charge of NASA?
DR. YORK: Yes. Keith Glennan was from the very beginning the director of NASA, called actually the administrator of NASA. I had many enjoyable days working things out with Keith on a wide variety of issues, not just that one, when he first had his office in the Dolly Madison House on Lafayette Square.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. YORK: Before NASA got its modern facilities and housing.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes. Well that was a very interesting period of history there, that particular program went from almost nothing to a very large program. So then you continued on as, essentially as assistant secretary in administering a broad variety of research and development.
DR. YORK: Yes, the entire program of the defense establishment.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. YORK: Everything from the development of better shoes for the troops, to tanks, to rockets, to airplanes, to satellite vehicles, to everything…
MR. LARSON: Yes. It must be essentially…
DR. YORK: To cryptology, to everything.
MR. LARSON: …tens of thousands of separate small items from better shoes to…
DR. YORK: Yes, around 80,000.
MR. LARSON: Yes. A fantastic variety there. Well, fine. Then at that particular, let’s see that approaches a transition period politically.
DR. YORK: Yeah. I stayed on very briefly into the Kennedy administration. Bob McNamara invited me to stay on indefinitely, but I had had a heart attack in the fall of 1960 and I really wasn’t sure what my, there were great uncertainties in my life brought about by that, which turned, I had a heart attack, but it did not in fact damage my health and 25 years later I still don’t have any problem, but I didn’t know that at the time. So I, when Kennedy was elected I was already then in the process of trying to figure out what to do next and arranging to go back to the University of California. By the time, before Bob McNamara even asked me to stay on, Clark Kerr who was president of the university asked me if I would be interested in being chancellor at UC San Diego, the new campus. He didn’t actually have the authority to offer me the job, but he could ask me if I was interested. So when Bob invited me to stay on, Bob McNamara, I said I would stay on briefly, but I wanted to get back to California and he said, well he’d like me to stay even briefly, help with the transition and to help in the selection of my successor. So I worked up a list of 13 names the name at the top of the list was Harold Brown and I explained to the Secretary he was at the top of the list because that was the alphabetical order, but in fact he was my favorite. He was my favorite candidate. So, Bob very quickly offered the job to Harold and I came here to San Diego to be chancellor. So then I got out of the defense side of things at least in any intensive way, although I very quickly got involved with arms control because one of Kennedy’s first acts was to set up a special agency housed in the State Department, but reporting to the President called the United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. I was known to be interested in this subject. I hadn’t mentioned it before, but when I was on the President’s Science Advisory Committee I supported the President’s view that there ought to be a test ban and work on technical questions to that end and in the Pentagon I continued to support this view of the President over the opposition of quite a few other, most of the other people in the Pentagon, but I was supporting the President at the time, with regard to Vella and so forth. When the new Arms Control Agency was formed and a general advisory committee which had presidential, consisted of people appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate, was established, I became one of the charter members of that, along with George Kistiakowsky and Robbie.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. YORK: The chairman was John J. McCloy, a New York banker and none of the other members were technical except for the ones I named. We had a Jesuit from Creighton University, and we had Roger Blough who was Chairman of the Board from U.S. Steel and we had Ralph McGill who was the editor and publisher of the Atlanta Constitution. A group like that.
MR. LARSON: Yes, a very distinguished group there. it must have been very interesting to work with…
DR. YORK: It was.
MR. LARSON: …the variety of intellectual backgrounds.
DR. YORK: Yeah and we got into the questions of test ban and the questions of strategic arms limitations, the questions of limiting antiballistic missiles very early and we had very rich discussions of those questions, but my main job was then here, setting up, helping to set up this new university and of course science and technology were involved there because this already was strong in science, ocean science, and even before I came, people like Harold Urey were recruited in chemistry, Keith Brookner, Waldo Cohn and others in physics and then it was my job to continue with that particular thrust.
MR. LARSON: So when you arrived, actually, were there, there weren’t students, essentially.
DR. YORK: There were graduate students.
MR. LARSON: They were graduate students at the time you arrived. Essentially you…
DR. YORK: There were no undergraduates until three years later.
MR. LARSON: You had to put together the bricks and mortar as well as the faculty.
DR. YORK: Yes and the faculty, other than in physics. Physics, chemistry, biology and oceanography were well established and had all a momentum of their own. I was involved in the establishment of mathematics and engineering, psychology and the social sciences, humanities, literature, philosophy and so forth.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes. Of course it grew to be a very large institution.
DR. YORK: I think to be modest about it, it’s the best, most successful of the post-war institutions.
MR. LARSON: Yes, of course it has a tremendous reputation in that way.
DR. YORK: But, I stepped down as chancellor after, less than four years and became, lived here and became re-involved more intensively in Washington national security affairs. I rejoined the President’s Science Advisory Committee, continued with the general committee on arms control, and became a member of the board, both of the Air and Space Corporation and the Institute for Defense Analysis.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. YORK: Worked with the Jason Group in the summer. So although I was here at the university, at least half of my intellectual effort was the technology that goes with defense.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes. So that occupied at least half of your attention as you say.
DR. YORK: When Carter became president, he appointed Harold Brown as Secretary of Defense and since Harold had been my assistant for so many years before and we had kept close contact with each other after he replaced me in the Pentagon, I showed up on his door step without being asked to see what I could do to help out. I did a lot of consulting for him and then joined, but he knew I was particularly interested in arms control in those days and so he made me his representative on the negotiations whose purpose was to try to stop the development of anti-satellites in ’78-’79, ’77-’78. They did not get very far. The Russians at first were not even, the Russians at first professed not to understand why one would want to banish anti-satellites. They thought, they made a, not a strong case, but a case for why a country might want to have them. They were willing to discuss what the equivalent to the rules of the road, non-interference and things like that, but they were not willing to discuss the actual banning or elimination of anti-satellite devices. They said we might need them against a third country.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. YORK: After doing that for about two years and also I was involved in studying questions of the B-1 bomber and air launch cruise missiles and things like that. The new purging’s. I got involved, suddenly, and this was mainly Harold’s doing, but I was, his suggestion, I became the chief negotiator for the test ban negotiations.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. YORK: I suddenly found myself with the title of ambassador and over there in Geneva, negotiating with the Russians and the British, attempting to work out a treaty which would ban the testing of nuclear weapons totally.
MR. LARSON: That would be the comprehensive test ban.
DR. YORK: Yes. We had a limited test ban since 1963. I was on the general advisory committee when that was being worked out. I didn’t have a great deal to do with it, but I was an insider, but not on a full time basis. I testified in favor of it when it came before the Congress, but in the case of the comprehensive test ban I was the chief negotiator, a very different position.
MR. LARSON: What was the outcome of that particular negotiation?
DR. YORK: The outcome was that we got 90 percent of the basic principles worked out, which you would have to work out, maybe even more than 90 percent, but only about half of the details. When we, a variety of external events brought us almost to a virtual halt, and then the election of Reagan brought us to a total halt, but we were dead in the water long before Reagan was elected.
MR. LARSON: Well of course there was Afghanistan.
DR. YORK: It was just as important at people forget it was the tar Haran affair. See although there may not seem to be a logical connection between the embassy and tar Haran and the comprehensive nuclear test ban, there is.
MR. LARSON: Would you clarify that please?
DR. YORK: There is a powerful connection because the controversial test ban, like almost everything with arms control, is very controversial within the American government. There are forces with very different views vying with each other for control of the process. The Department of Energy and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were opposed to a comprehensive test ban. Well when the Iranians captured the American embassy that simply froze the American government. It was no longer possible to handle any kind of controversial issue that didn’t involve what was going on in Iran. So that the, it became impossible to get any kind of useful instructions out of Washington as soon as the embassy was captured.
MR. LARSON: Well that was amazing how an incident like that unrelated on the surface, would immobilize our country like that.
DR. YORK: But it did. It would not have immobilized it if it hadn’t been controversial. See, if we had good instructions and we had the capability of moving ahead as negotiations proceeded of responding to the Russians without making every small response a huge federal case, we would have been able to go ahead. But because the whole thing was so controversial everything we wanted to do that would move the negotiations forward, either the Department of Energy of the Joint Chiefs would say you can’t do that. That’s much too important an issue. That has to be discussed at the Cabinet and there was not the slightest chance in the world of ever getting the Cabinet to discuss anything. So it was the simplest of all bureaucratic maneuvers. Those bureaucrats who don’t want any progress can always stop it by saying that question has to be studied and it was impossible to study the most trivial question at that time. So it was the combination of the fact that it was controversial and the controversies could only be settled at the highest level that brought it to a halt. Then of course there was the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. And we went back to Geneva in the spring of, January of 1960 with the instructions to go slowly, proceed slowly and not to, minimal fraternization so that we could still have business lunches with the Russians, but we couldn’t have cocktail receptions for them.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes. They seem to be a small thing, but distinct.
DR. YORK: It didn’t stop us from talking; in fact it interfered with the lower levels of the delegations. There was no problem for me to talk with my opposite member, or even one layer down, my deputy to talk with his opposite member, but the other people in the delegation at the next level depended on these receptions and things like that to have most of their chances to talk with their opposite members and they were cut off.
MR. LARSON: That’s a very interesting sidelight on history, the interactions of all of these things. It must have been very exciting of you to participate in these global issues at that time.
DR. YORK: Yeah it was.
MR. LARSON: Well of course then you were just about reaching another change in so far as the political situation is concerned. The reelection of…
DR. YORK: This one a bigger change altogether, the change from Carter to Reagan was, all changes of Presidents are pretty dramatic, but this one was much more so than any other that I know about. So it’s all of those, my connections with the government all stopped with the top levels of the government stopped just absolutely. I maintain still to this day a close connection with the American defense program however, through the fact that I am still a member of the trustees of the Air and Space Corporation and the Institute for Defense Analysis.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. YORK: So that I am still involved in that way in all of the things that are happening. And then here at the university quite separate from that, but obviously closely related, I have this new institute that deals with peace and security studies as one element of that we have a research contract here at San Diego to study the political and strategic implications of the Strategic Defense Initiative, Star Wars.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes. Now that’s sponsored as a part of the university system, or…
DR. YORK: The institute is sponsored mainly by the regents of the University of California and the State of California, each of them separately, as part, as a multi-campus activity within the University of California. This research grant, the Star Wars issue is actually an outside grant from the Carnegie Corporation.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes. So that, and that occupies I suppose because of its very nature and controversy, occupies a good fraction of your attention, and thought at this particular time.
DR. YORK: Right. I find it both very interesting and also very difficult.
MR. LARSON: Yes. It must be very difficult the, it’s one of these things in which the facts and the semantics and the emotions all confuse things so much as it’s almost hard to get a rational discussion, much less an understanding.
DR. YORK: The technical issues all involve the future course of technology because the issue, virtually everyone has agreed that nobody knows how to build these systems today, so the question is could you build them, what do you do now in order to build them in 20 or 30 years. Then beyond that the issue is even if you could do it is it a good idea, and then beyond that are a whole lot of issues that are not, which are kind of behind the scenes, but are important having to do with how this whole thing came about. The fact that it was done by White House fiat and that Edward Teller was personally importantly involved, I don’t think he’s the main reason, but he’s importantly involved, he’s created, has exacerbated what controversy there is, so that many of the attitudes I would say attitudes which are basically right are heavily colored by the fact that the people who hold them, you know, have very strong negative views of both Reagan and Teller.
MR. LARSON: Yes of course, it’s a real…
DR. YORK: To the point of hatred in many cases.
MR. LARSON: It’s a real problem of misunderstandings, emotions and so it’s hard to sort out purely scientific facts and the other aspects of this thing.
DR. YORK: But it is very interesting and I have many fingers in that particular pot.
MR. LARSON: So with, then right on the forefront of one of the most important studies and decisions that are going to be made in the next four or five years.
DR. YORK: My most interesting connections are not the academic ones, but in fact the ones I have through IDA and Air and Space, both of which are very much involved in the program.
MR. LARSON: Yeah, so…
DR. YORK: But the one we have here, it’s easy to talk about and involves friends and colleagues here on the campus and adds a great deal of interest to the whole thing.
MR. LARSON: Fine. Well this has been a fascinating exposition of the number and diversity of things that you have been involved in all of your life and I think it has given us a good comprehensive view of these things as much as we can do in this limited time. I was wondering if there were any other things that you think back now that we may not have covered at this time.
DR. YORK: Well I think we probably did pretty well. I will want a copy of the tape myself.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. YORK: I have an archive here on campus.
MR. LARSON: Well, very good then. I think this has been a very valuable addition to our archival collection and I want to thank you Herb for your time and patience in giving us all of this information.
[End of Interview]

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PIONEERS IN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY SERIES
ORAL HISTORY OF DR. HERBERT YORK
Interviewed by Clarence Larson
Filmed by Jane Larson
November 29, 1985
Transcribed by Jordan Reed
MR. LARSON: …doing some in the computer field, and physics, Charlie Townes in physics. So it’s been a variety, and then I made arrangements with the University of California at Berkeley, MIT…
[Break in video]
MR. LARSON: …library. You haven’t pressed the…
MRS. LARSON: I have. I just did.
MR. LARSON: You just did. So all right, we can start. If it’s all right with you we’ll go ahead.
DR. YORK: Ok.
MR. LARSON: To just identify the tape, it won’t appear in the…
DR. YORK: Sure.
MR. LARSON: …tape, I just say a few words and then I say, “Please proceed.” Then I would like to have you sort of give some of your early background which leads you into the field of science. That’s always a part I have found very interesting in every film. Then going into your highlights of your career, both scientific and administrative. So we essentially get a complete, as though it’s autobiographical film. So, fine. You all ready, Jane? Very good. Well, today, November 29, 1985, we are privileged to introduce Dr. Herb York whose pioneer work in physics has spanned many of the projects of decisive importance to our nation. His many awards would take too much time to describe without impinging on his valuable time. So I will simply ask you to please proceed, Dr. York.
DR. YORK: Ok and you would like me to start…
MR. LARSON: With the early background.
DR. YORK: With early background, ok. I was born and raised in Rochester, New York and my father was a railroad man as his father had been before and I had a fairly happy, but not terribly eventful childhood. But I got interested in science very early. My earliest memories involve wondering about numbers and things like that.
MR. LARSON: Do you remember about what age you were, thinking about it?
DR. YORK: Kindergarten, I bugged people about what comes after a billion and a trillion, and other trivial things like that.
MR. LARSON: Other powers of ten.
DR. YORK: I was about eight or nine when an uncle of my father happened to give me two books, one of them was called Astronomy for Amateurs and it was by Camille Flammarion, a great French Astronomer.
MR. LARSON: Yes, a very famous book which has persisted to this day as a matter of fact.
DR. YORK: The particular one I referred to?
MR. LARSON: No, the Flammarion book of astronomy, we bought one about five years ago.
DR. YORK: Well this particular book is Astronomy for Amateurs in English.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. YORK: And the French title, which happily I didn’t know at the time, was Astronomy for Women. If I had known that, I might not have been willing to read it.
MR. LARSON: Be careful of any sexist remarks.
DR. YORK: That’s simply the fact. I’m talking about a period 50 years ago, more than 50 years ago. The other book was on crack, quack medicine, having to do with the treatment of disease by color. There was nothing to it except a lot of funny testimonials and so, but it had a beautiful spectrum with a lot of lines in it. They frown over the spectrum of the sun. But the book Astronomy for Amateurs, I just glommed onto with enormous interest and I still remember the style of the book. The chapter on the sun would start out with words like, “Oh, great globe of day, oh, life giving orb.”
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. YORK: Whole series of very dramatic statements like that, then followed by data about the sun. The sun is 860,000 miles in diameter. The moon is 2,200 miles in diameter and so forth. All qualitative, all nonmathematical except the last chapter which dealt with the trigonometric means for measuring the distance of the planets, which I couldn’t understand at all at the time, but the, all the rest of it was marvelously general and qualitative and very dramatic. I enjoyed it very much and read it several times, along about the same time I was reading Tarzan and things of that sort. I didn’t do particularly well in science in grammar school and high school. I didn’t particularly like the courses. So I entered the University of Rochester with the idea of majoring in engineering because the only professional man my father knew was an engineer. He was a chemical engineer at Eastman Kodak named Garson Meyer and when it came time to go to college, it always seemed obvious I was going to go to college. I mean it was my father’s idea that I should and it just was a part of growing up, the assumption that I would. He was determined that I would not be a railroad man. So, the question was what would I do in college at the University of Rochester. I went to visit Mr. Meyer who was head of one of the chemical engineering laboratories at Kodak and he seemed to enjoy what he was doing so I went, majored in chemical engineering that first year.
MR. LARSON: Well you joined very distinguished people in that. People like [Eugene] Wigner, [Edward] Teller, we were talking to Dr. [William] Fowler at Cal Tech the other day. They all started out in engineering.
DR. YORK: I didn’t stay long in engineering, only one year because when I got to the University of Rochester which is a very fine place and for which I have enormously positive feelings. I feel very fortunate to have gone there. It was a good university, an extraordinarily good university in a small town. I went there because I lived there and for no other reason.
MR. LARSON: What year did you enter college?
DR. YORK: I entered in 1939 and that’s important with regard to the rest of my career because the war in Europe started about a week or two before I entered.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. YORK: So that war and the things that flowed from it have dominated my entire career. But while there, in my first year I made a lot of discoveries of things I’ve never heard about before, graduate education, Ph.D.’s, teaching assistants who were graduate research assistants, and so forth, I discovered that they enjoyed what they were doing. For the first time ever I started thinking about college or school generally not as a means to an end, that is to say to get a better job, but as an end in itself. I discovered that there were people who were doing chemistry as an end in itself rather than a means to a job. So I switched very quickly to chemistry because engineering didn’t have that kind of people. They were all in chemistry where they had people like that at Rochester. Then in the course of becoming a chemistry student I had to take physics and I discovered I liked physics even better. So I met some of the people who were very important to me in those years were Viki [Victor] Weisskopf and Syd Barnes and Joe Platt.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. YORK: All of whom were professors there. And then as I began to move through the sophomore and junior years, they started leaving for these projects in various places. Joe Platt went to MIT to work on radar. Viki Weisskopf went off first to Chicago and then to Los Alamos, although I didn’t know it was Los Alamos at the time, to work on, what was obviously the atomic bomb project and finally I, myself joined, eagerly joined this flood of people leaving education and going to war. Fortunately for me I was recruited by an agent of Ernest Lawrence to come to Berkeley. So I arrived in Berkeley in the spring of 1943, to join the Manhattan Project.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes. Well that gives a very fine introduction. And of course you mentioned along the line several very important people who were important on both the electromagnetic project and at Los Alamos and so on.
DR. YORK: You must of known Syd Barnes well yourself.
MR. LARSON: Yes, of course. Syd Barnes was my next door neighbor in Oak Ridge.
DR. YORK: In Oak Ridge. Well I helped him build a swimming pool at his house at Oak Ridge.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes. I remember that.
DR. YORK: He had those two delightful daughters and a son there at the time.
MR. LARSON: He did work on the cyclotron at Rochester.
DR. YORK: The cyclotron at Rochester was one of several cyclotrons, each of which is the second cyclotron built after the ones at Berkeley. There were ones at Princeton and I guess Cornell, I guess built all about the same time and the, I had the opportunity to work on the cyclotron at Rochester. Not in getting it going, but in using it and my, one of my early paid jobs was running it to produce radioactive materials for use in radiobiology and medicine.
MR. LARSON: Yes, well fine. I remember personally myself working with you indirectly on the receivers for the U-235 and the so called Beta stage and those were very exciting days.
DR. YORK: Well that was after, that was an outgrowth of going to Berkeley. I went to Berkeley and worked on the whole calutron project, met Lawrence fairly early but I worked directly at first for Frank Oppenheimer and Fred Schmidt then later for Eugene Gardner on the receivers for the calutrons as you said. Then you recall that the first attempt to start up the calutrons at Oak Ridge in the fall of ’43 didn’t work out. So Lawrence arranged to transfer, I suppose, about 100 of us from Berkeley to Oak Ridge to participate in actually getting the whole plant going. So in early ’44, that is what I was primarily doing, was just one of the big group there to get the calutrons going and we did succeed. Within that project I concentrated on the design of the receivers and worked particularly with those questions that had to do with the tradeoffs between quantity and quality. And because I was working on the tradeoff between quality and quantity, I was one of the very few people at Oak Ridge who had any idea about…
[Break in video]
DR. YORK: …I remember telling Lawrence that I could do a better job if he would tell me how it did tradeoff, how the critical mass depended on the concentration. So a few weeks later when he had been to Los Alamos, he came back and gave me just a tiny scrap of paper with about four pairs of numbers on it which represented the curve that connected these two quantities and then I optimized the design of the receivers to take that into account.
MR. LARSON: Yes. That’s very interesting and very important there. I remember [Emilio] Segre was one of the men who helped work out the critical mass...
DR. YORK: Yes. I didn’t know Segre until the war was over.
MR. LARSON: …optimizing, as they say, the enrichment necessary because there was a tradeoff there on quantity. If you had one without the other, it didn’t do very good. So very interesting there. Well of course the net result is your projects were successful and then what was your next move then after Oak Ridge.
DR. YORK: As soon as the war was over, I hastened back to Berkeley to become one of the junior employees at Lawrence’s Berkeley Laboratory, which was a somewhat reduced version of the wartime laboratory. I was fortunate enough to be one of the ones he kept on and became at the same time a graduate student. So I became a graduate student at Berkeley and a researcher, or a junior researcher in the laboratory. First engaged, my first job was operating the 60 inch cyclotron. Again, just producing radioactive materials for other people and doing it mostly at night shift, and even owl shift while trying to go to school during the day time. But after about a year of that I got first into health physics when they were turning on the big cyclotron, the question was where is the radiation and how much is there when the machine is working and so I joined with some others with making measurements of that. Burt Moyer was my first boss in that regard, but that didn’t look like a very exciting long-term thing to be doing, so I quite early worked myself into an arrangement whereby I was doing experiments with the beams produced by the cyclotron. It was a time that could never be reproduced because here was the biggest machine in the world at that time and I was a graduate student with some times as much as 25 percent of the total time for weeks on end just devoted to experiments that I was doing, scattering neutrons off of protons, doing other kinds of neutron-nuclei interactions and a little bit later doing the first work, the observations of the neutral meson and nowadays you have to be a full professor and join all the other people in order to do such work, but it was just a golden age where we students could get the biggest and most powerful machine in the world to ourselves.
MR. LARSON: Yes, that’s an amazing period in high-energy physics because as you say, you implied you see a paper and hierarchy physics, there is likely to be 25 names.
DR. YORK: And none of them are graduate students.
MR. LARSON: Yes.
DR. YORK: Well I got to know Lawrence well. I had come to know him during the war and I liked him and he seemed to like me and when I would work in the evenings at the Berkeley Laboratory, he would often come in after supper and he generally toured the laboratory, must have toured it once a week when he was around and he would always stop by and ask me what I was doing. Then I would tell him briefly what I was doing, he would look at the oscilloscopes. You know there are a lot of oscilloscopes there with pulses on them and I would be sitting there taking data. It was long before there was automatic recording of data, or automatic data reduction. And I would tell him, he would give me a big smile, a pat on the head so to speak, and then go on to someone else. I recall one Christmas Eve when I was there working on a project that he in fact had put me on. These other things I am speaking of were mainly what I started myself, but he remained interested in defense-oriented work and he had a project that was designed to be an alternative way of separating uranium isotopes involving time separation and a pulse device. I was working on that and we were somehow crowded for time and I was up there early on a Christmas Eve, Sybil was at home with one child and he came by to see how we were doing. Then he said, “I’m going up to the singlotron to see what’s going on there.” he went up, came back, you know, five minutes later with this dismayed look on his face. He said, “There’s no one there.” (Laughter) Which wasn’t a surprise to me and I went home myself shortly afterwards.
MR. LARSON: That’s a very interesting, interesting piece of memorabilia connected with those days and typical of a E.O. Lawrence experience. You were doing graduate work at the same time, and so you got your Ph.D. then at Berkeley.
DR. YORK: Yeah, in about ’49, after getting back to Berkeley, a little less than four years and then I stayed on briefly as a professor and a post-doctoral researcher. In those days there were all kinds of job offers coming in to all of us at Berkeley. I got my share of those and Ernest would bring them himself, but he would always encourage me not to take them and I didn’t want to. I liked it very much at Berkeley and wanted to stay right there because it was the center of the world and I just wanted a good front seat on the center of the world. But after a couple of years, well, I got my Ph.D. in April of ’49 and that August was the first Russian atomic bomb and Ernest with the help of [Luis] Alvarez and a few others, was anxious to sort of remobilize as I’m sure other people have said and so he began looking for ways to involve himself. He made trips himself and Luis made trips to Los Alamos to talk with the people there, [Edward] Teller, [Norris] Bradbury and the others and they then suggested that Bradner and I should go down and see if there was anything we could do, Hugh Bradner, to see if there was anything that we at Berkeley could do to help with the hydrogen bomb program that was then just blossoming at Los Alamos.
MR. LARSON: Essentially the decision had been made to go ahead…
DR. YORK: Yes, by Truman.
MR. LARSON: So that you were right there in the forefront.
DR. YORK: That’s right. The decision was made by January of ’50, and I was there in the spring of ’50, looking into the question of what it is Berkeley could do to help on that project. Lawrence was following his own line and building the, and looking into the question of building a reactor to make a lot of tritium and then building a, actually starting a project to build a large machine to produce the neutrons by brute force that would then be used to make tritium, plutonium or whatever, but he also sent Bradner and me to Los Alamos to see what else we could do. We discovered that they could use help on so called diagnostic experiments that is making observations at the microsecond that the explosions take place. So Brad and I set up a project of equipment and a team of people which included Harold Brown incidentally and at Berkeley we designed this apparatus and the network of recording instruments and so forth. We set some of it up at Livermore which was already being used by Lawrence for his big accelerator project, production accelerator, but mainly we worked in Berkeley. Then we transported all this equipment out to Enewetak [Atoll] and set it up on an island out there to observe the first large explosion that involved a thermonuclear reaction. A device called George that a group of people at Los Alamos, Teller, [Enrico] Fermi, [John] Von Neumann and others had been busily engaged in working out. It wasn’t the direct ancestor of today’s hydrogen bomb in the design sense, but it sort of was a place for checking out ideas and calculations that later led to the mainline development of the Super.
MR. LARSON: Yes. This involved essentially liquid hydrogen, tritium…
DR. YORK: It involved a very small amount of liquid neutronium and tritium, which was ignited by a very large fission explosion designed to produce enough energy and heat to make that happen. So it was a tiny thermonuclear explosion in the presence of a very large fission explosion.
MR. LARSON: But enough for diagnostics.
DR. YORK: Enough to make these diagnostic measurements. We measured the temperature under which the explosion and reactions took place. Other people measured the rate of the reaction itself by observing the neutrons that are produced. We were successful in doing that experiment but that meant that I was then the house expert at Berkeley about what was going on at Los Alamos.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. YORK: So then when the question of a second laboratory became more and more heated, I mean Teller had been promoting this idea for quite some time, one of the commissioners happened to call Lawrence just before New Year’s 1952 to ask him what he thought. Murray, Thomas Murray, he had been in touch before, but I wasn’t aware of it. On New Year’s Day there was a party at Carl Hemold’s house at which Lawrence and I met and Ernest said come and see me at your, you know, earliest convenience. So, I was all eager to see him, and a couple days later I went in and he said, “Should there be a second laboratory?”
MR. LARSON: Oh yes. That’s a very interesting historical incident there.
DR. YORK: Right I said…
MR. LARSON: No, can we fix that date roughly?
DR. YORK: The date that he said to come him see him was January 1, 1952. The day I actually saw him must have been within the first week, but I visited his office on, you know, the next working day is what it amounts to, whatever that was, at Berkeley. So, I said I would look into it. I made a series of trips to Los Alamos where I already knew the people, Teller and the others, Bradbury to visit with them on this subject. I went, well Teller was at Chicago by then, so I went up there to visit with him. I went to Washington where I visited people in the Pentagon, Jimmy Doolittle, Benny Shraver, people in the Atomic Energy Commission, Gordon Dean, Thomas Murray and always talking with these people about the connection between the hydrogen bomb and national security, what it was that was needed, what kind of program and effort was needed. After a fairly short time, this I don’t know the date, but sometime in February, lets say, of ’52, I told Lawrence that I thought it was a good idea. He, you will recall was ill that spring. I mean he had colitis for some years, but he had a special problem with it during the spring of ’52, so he spent a lot of time away.
MR. LARSON: Yes.
DR. YORK: So I would only see him occasionally and whenever I saw him, he would encourage me to make plans for a second laboratory.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. YORK: So I drew up plans for doing diagnostic work, for doing controlled thermonuclear work, basic physics, and then in addition, developing nuclear weapons there at Livermore. It wasn’t obvious that that would be part of the whole package. That’s of course what Teller wanted, but it’s not necessarily what we were going to do. Finally we decided we were going to do the whole package, take the whole enchilada, build a new laboratory at Livermore that would do all of those things, including weapons design. Then we started recruiting and during the late spring and summer of 1952 I recruited about 20 physicists who would join us out there. Teller was off and on, he blew hot and cold on the project. He wanted a second laboratory, but he wasn’t really quite convinced that this one we were going to build out there was the one he wanted. So at one point he did in fact announce that he was not going to come and at the urging of the Washington authorities, Ernest and I did what we could to talk Teller back into sticking with the project. We were going to go ahead with it anyway and he did finally agree and so on September 1952 with around 100 people we started the Livermore Laboratory out there at the site where it still is today. Among those were some people who have been very influential in the times following that, in particular, I think particularly of Harold Brown, but Duane Sewell who was the engineering manager from the beginning became Assistant Secretary of Energy for National Security Affairs.
MR. LARSON: Yes, of course I know him. He was a former student of mine, as an undergraduate.
DR. YORK: Is that so?
MR. LARSON: So I’ve known him for a number of years.
DR. YORK: Well, in addition, Johnny Foster became one of the other secretaries of defense and Jerry Johnson who joined us soon after, became the assistant to the secretary for Atomic Energy. So that group, that initial group produced a lot of people who then went on to have a lot of influence and say in what would happen in the future.
MR. LARSON: Those were very exciting days. As a matter of fact, I believe I visited you some place around late ’52 or ’53 when you were just getting started. I remember the difficulties you were having with recruitment at that time because…
DR. YORK: We managed to make it.
MR. LARSON: …it was way out there in the boondocks so to speak.
DR. YORK: That’s right. We were about 50 miles from Berkeley and that was far enough so that the distance was a negative factor and a lot of the people declined to live in Livermore. Edward Teller never moved out there, always lived in Berkeley. Harold Brown lived half way in between, but Johnny Foster, Jerry Johnson, Duane Sewell and I all lived right in Livermore, you know a mile, two miles from the Laboratory.
MR. LARSON: So that was, as things went along then, you started developing the Laboratory as an integrated and well-rounded laboratory essentially.
DR. YORK: But with a focus on nuclear weapons.
MR. LARSON: Yes.
DR. YORK: But with activities in other closely related areas, specifically for the purpose of making it a more interesting and well-rounded place. We had some troubles at first with the devices that we produced and tested, but we managed to just go right through those difficulties and after a couple of years developed a very good track record of performance in that particular field.
MR. LARSON: How many of those developments are not, are declassified or not classified at this time that you participated in?
DR. YORK: Well the majority of things are not declassified, that is to say there is certain information about them, certain explosions took place on certain dates and it’s also publicly established that for instance the first Polaris warheads were developed at Livermore and certain of the nuclear artillery. There are things like that, but none of the details of, none of the advances per say are all still classified. In addition to that, we did do some peripheral activities. We worked on nuclear rockets, nuclear ramjet, neither of those worked out. We worked on controlled thermonuclear, particularly, well in those days solely the magnetic bottle-type of nuclear fusion. The inertially confined fusion didn’t start until long after I had left. And the mirror machines, which are one of the mainline approaches to the fusion problem were adopted, were, that’s what we started with when we started the program at Livermore. I started the program at Livermore, inspired by the programs at Princeton that [Lyman] Spitzer had and the one that [James] Tuck had at Los Alamos, plus this strange information that was showing in the press about success in this area in Argentina by this strange man [Ronald] Richter.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes, that is a very fascinating story, how much that spurred on the activity.
DR. YORK: Spitzer’s program was stimulated by that. I mean, he gives it credit for making him first start thinking about it.
MR. LARSON: Yes.
DR. YORK: But it goes beyond that. I was in the Soviet Union 10, 15 years after these days we’re talking about, talking with Galivan, who was one of [Igor] Kurchatov’s principal assistants, and one of the originators of the Soviet controlled nuclear program. He said that they were getting ready to start up such a program in 1951, ’52, when they read about the Argentina, the claimed successes of the Argentinian and they used those claims as one of the arguments for getting money out of the Bureau to start one of those programs. So the Soviet program, like the American program owes really quite a bit in terms of stimulus to these false reports coming out of Argentina.
MR. LARSON: I can remember talking to [Henry] Smyth who was a commissioner at that time about the Richter development and I said, “Sounds like thermonuclear is to be.” He said, “Well several other people have mentioned it.”
DR. YORK: Well, that’s what he was claiming.
MR. LARSON: So…
DR. YORK: I now have a book out in my office in Spanish which is devoted to that entire episode that is full of details about it that I have never seen anywhere else.
MR. LARSON: That’s a very interesting piece of history there and that’s why I wanted you to elaborate a little bit. This has been very helpful.
DR. YORK: Yes. In my new institute that I am now running, we have a young woman named Yetal Goldman, a political scientist at UCLA, she’s one of our graduate fellows, dissertation fellow, she is doing research on proliferation in Argentina and Brazil. She has lived there and is of course a fluent Spanish and Portuguese speaker and it was she who brought me in touch with this latest work. I was telling her about Richter, his influence and she has given me a copy of this book. If you read Spanish, I could even loan it to you.
MR. LARSON: No, I’m not fluent.
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DR. YORK: Sybil, telephone man is coming in the back!
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DR. YORK: It seems informal enough to be all right.
MR. LARSON: Oh yeah. When we reproduce the copies, we just cut those out.
DR. YORK: Oh my.
MR. LARSON: So…
DR. YORK: That’s the best part.
MR. LARSON: That’s, no problem.
DR. YORK: If the telephone man has to come through here, we’ll have to interrupt, but...
MR. LARSON: All right. Fine.
DR. YORK: That’s why you had the trouble calling us. We have two telephone numbers and about six or seven telephones…
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MRS. LARSON: Go ahead.
DR. YORK: We all right? The dogs can get out right over there if they want to, so we don’t have to worry about it.
MR. LARSON: Well, very good, fine. We’ll just proceed.
DR. YORK: Ok.
MR. LARSON: All right, we’re rolling. Where are we?
MRS. LARSON: What were you talking about?
DR. YORK: We were talking about Richter…
MR. LARSON: We had almost finished Richter I believe. All right well, then your work at Livermore then, of course followed up on all of these various areas of approach to control thermonuclear work and as, then of course you were proceeding on the broad aspects of the applications of Livermore to developing nuclear weapons.
DR. YORK: Because of that I was deeply involved as a consultant to the various military groups that were using nuclear weapons, so were some of the others, but I was probably more deeply involved than anyone else at Livermore. I was a member of two committees chaired by Von Neumann. One was the Nuclear Panel of the Air Force Science Advisory Board and the other was a special committee reporting to the Secretary of the Air Force and Secretary of Defense advising on the ICBM [Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles] and related long range missiles, the sea launched missiles and the IRBMs [Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles] as well. That got me closely connected with people like George Kistiakowsky and Jerry Weesner whom I had not known during the war and then I was part of one of the advisors to the Garther Panel which met just before Sputnik and through that I met Jim Killian and the net result of all of that was that when Eisenhower decided to form a science advisory panel reporting directly to him after Sputnik as part of the American response to Sputnik, he asked Killian to be the chairman and Killian invited me to be one of the new members. So that got me into the White House.
MR. LARSON: So you were really then one of the original President’s Science Advisory Committee.
DR. YORK: My particular job was to work on the reorganization both in terms of structure and in terms of program of the American space program.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. YORK: Both the military space program and the civilian space program. So I was a part of a small group of three or four people who worked out the plans for the creation of NASA on the one hand to run the civil space program, the original rough plans for having man in space, going to the moon and all of that, and then simultaneously on the military side for the reconnaissance satellites and all of those things that the military uses. That occupied me essentially from December ’57, right after Sputnik to about March of ’58. I was a part of the whole White House team that planned these things. Then in March ’58, they sold me across the river to the Pentagon where I became the chief scientist of ARPA [Advanced Research Projects Agency] whose principal function was to develop the military space program. You can come through.
MRS. YORK: Oh.
DR. YORK: They can just edit the tape, just please don’t knock the lights, that’s all. Do you want to go ahead?
MR. LARSON: Well, fine.
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Yeah, the lights going.
MR. LARSON: Very good. We’re on camera again. Very good, fine. We’ll just continue then. So as, while you were there as first on the Presidential Science Advisory Committee, you were still at Livermore, but then you immediately went over as chief scientist…
DR. YORK: I was on the Livermore payroll, so to speak, until I was assigned to ARPA, but from December 1 to about March or April 1, I didn’t spend, I spent very little time at Livermore, but I was not replaced, but just by an acting director. Then when it was determined that I was going to be staying for a long time in Washington, Mark Mills probably would have been my successor as director of Livermore, but he was killed at about that time.
MR. LARSON: I remember that very sad accident.
DR. YORK: Yeah, a helicopter crash out in Utah. So Edward Teller decided that he would try his hand at it and nobody could stop him.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes. Fine. So Edward Teller succeeded you then.
DR. YORK: Yes and was director for over a year at which point Harold Brown became director.
MR. LARSON: So well, fine. What things were you directly involved in then as the director of ARPA?
DR. YORK: I was chief scientist of ARPA and Roy Johnson was director. He was from the white coats part of General Electric and was, they brought him in because they wanted a person who looked like an executive running ARPA and I was in my middle thirty’s at the time and although some people wanted Killian and people in the White House wanted me to be the director, the compromise they worked out was me as chief scientist and Roy Johnson as director. What we did, the main part of the work at ARPA was to establish, really to reestablish the American and military space program and to do certain things for the civilian space program as well, in the interim period before NASA was established. Sybil are you… to do these, we for example took the initiative for getting the big so called Nova engine going. It was, or F-1 engine, it was a rocket engine that would generate one million pounds of thrust. It’s only use eventually was in connection with the Apollo program. But on the military side, there already were a, there were some programs going, there were a lot of ideas for new ones, we made minor modifications in the ongoing programs. They really were much better than the public had been lead to believe by the press. And then we introduced a few new programs on top of that and essentially got the program in hand. There was inter-service rivalry and a spread of authority over too many different hands was in fact causing problems within the program and making us miss some opportunities and do some things unnecessarily, expensively and so on. So there was a certain amount of rationalization going on and remodeling which ARPA did during that first year. In addition to that we started a number of projects under the heading we called Defender which was a program whose purpose was to develop, to explore the more advanced forms of anti-ballistic missile.
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MR. LARSON: Ready to go again?
DR. YORK: The little red light.
MR. LARSON: All right, well fine. We’re coming along very nicely. Well with regard to that, the contributions of ARPA at the time, let’s see, I believe it was about that time that ARPA became very involved in developing advanced computers which proved to be…
DR. YORK: That was a little later.
MR. LARSON: That was a little later then...
DR. YORK: Yes. We didn’t get into computers when I was there. We were satellites and missile defense, were the two main lines, we had some minor lines of developing fuels for solid rockets and we, but we did institute, you remind me, another national program during that period which has become very important, that was a program in materials development.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes. Of course that was a very important program…
DR. YORK: That is still going on.
MR. LARSON: …that ARPA started, it has led to tremendous developments of materials.
DR. YORK: Yeah, but one of the satellites we introduced for example, one of the space programs we introduced was one called Vella, which is the satellite developed to detect nuclear tests from space and it also by accident opened up the field now known as gamma ray astronomy because those same satellites detected natural bursts of gamma radiation which were similar to the kind of radiation we were expecting to detect from clandestine nuclear explosions or from a loud nuclear explosion.
MR. LARSON: Well I believe that the data from that has been very important in astrophysics.
DR. YORK: But mainly the Vella program was a whole series of instruments space-based, but ground-based as well, whose purpose was to monitor nuclear tests anywhere in the world, which is something of interest for general intelligence reasons, but it’s of even greater interest with arms control.
MR. LARSON: What year did that become operational?
DR. YORK: The early ‘60’s. We started in the period 1958, ’59. I don’t really know when it became operational, but sometime in the early 60’s.
MR. LARSON: Well, fine. That was certainly, you were involved in the starting of some very important programs and of course I believe the name of ARPA has been changed.
DR. YORK: It’s now DARPA. It’s got a D on the front meaning Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
MR. LARSON: It has led to certainly advancing science of some very important military, but it has some substantial civilian off-shoots.
DR. YORK: Yeah and as you said, in later years it has been very heavily involved as one of the prime movers in certain advances in the computer field.
MR. LARSON: Well, fine. How long did you stay then in the field, so far as ARPA…
DR. YORK: I was chief scientist of ARPA for only about eight months.
MR. LARSON: Oh is that right?
DR. YORK: But then as another part of the organization of the National, you know, National Administration of Technology, they created this position called Director of Research Defense and Engineering. That’s a generic assistant secretary of defense but with a different name. The job was open, I mean after the Defense Reorganization Act of 1958 was passed, that was part of it, the job was open and they were looking for people and finally in December, Secretary [Neil] McElroy said the President and I would like you to take this position. I didn’t know that most Assistant Secretaries never do see the President, but I already knew him because I had been working in the White House. So I said Fine, I’ll talk with the President about it. And McElroy with a big smile and without a pause turned around and picked up the white telephone on the table behind him and made a date for me to see the President the next morning. So I went over and we talked about it and it was a very pleasurable experience for me. The President said that you were my candidate all along, he said, but they wanted somebody older and more distinguished. But at any rate they did offer me the job and I accepted it promptly and so I became the Director of Defense Research and Engineering at the end of 1958.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. YORK: That was rather awkward for Roy Johnson because I had been working for him up to that point and now the relationship was reversed. And there was a little difficulty over that which we did work out because as usual in bureaucratic arrangements there is a lot of contradictions and the boiler plate and his job description said he reported to the Secretary of Defense. My job description said that I was responsible for all research and development in engineering in the entire Department of Defense. Those were contradictory but what was finally worked out was fairly simple. I did in fact review his program the same as I reviewed everybody else’s programs, Army, Navy, and Air Force, approved them or disapproved them, as my staff and I decided. He did indeed in the administrative sense, he reported to the Secretary of Defense.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes. Very interesting administrative obligations.
DR. YORK: Yes, but then we had further trouble because the ARPA people were gung-ho for military man in space and it was the President’s view and it was my view that there was no foreseeable need for a military man in space. I think history has won me out on that, but the big man in space program was part of the civil space agency, NASA, it belonged with them. There were a lot of contradictions because the Department of Defense was developing, they had the money and the responsibility for the biggest boosters, the biggest rocket engines and the agency actually developing them was the Army Ballistic Agency with [Wernher] Von Braun but NASA had the responsibility for using them so to speak for the programs that would need them. So, I then began a rearrangement. I then pursued as Director of Defense Research and Engineering a reorganizational plan that ultimately led to Von Braun being transferred to NASA, the Army Ballistic Missile Agency facilities that Von Braun controlled also being transferred to NASA and the responsibility for the big rockets, the Nova, the Saturn 1-B, and the Saturn 1-5, that ultimately led to the Apollo, all those should be transferred from the Department of Defense to NASA and then those other things that ARPA was doing that were military satellites, reconnaissance and so on, I decided that now that things had been rearranged and the programs were now going well, they should be transferred back to the Air Force. So one of my acts as director of defense research and engineering was to take virtually all the entire ARPA space program and give the big booster part of it to NASA and the military satellite part to the Air Force, leaving ARPA with almost nothing, in the way of space programs. That caused a certain additional friction between me and Johnson and the other people at ARPA and between me and the Army people as well.
MR. LARSON: Well it seemed a very logical and efficient way for operating.
DR. YORK: Yes. The way it has worked out as I see it, the way it has worked out confirms my views. That’s when the heater downstairs goes out.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes. No problem.
DR. YORK: No. So the biggest thing I did as DDRE in that first year was to make the last and final rearrangement in the way the United States went about its space program.
MR. LARSON: Well that’s, let’s see, what year again was that?
DR. YORK: 1959.
MR. LARSON: 1959, that all was administratively straightened out with regard to what was NASA and what was the Army…
DR. YORK: And what was the Air Force…
MR. LARSON: And what was ARPA. That was quite a thing to untangle.
DR. YORK: It was bloody at times. It was while McElroy was Secretary of Defense.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes. At that time, was Keith Glennan in charge of NASA?
DR. YORK: Yes. Keith Glennan was from the very beginning the director of NASA, called actually the administrator of NASA. I had many enjoyable days working things out with Keith on a wide variety of issues, not just that one, when he first had his office in the Dolly Madison House on Lafayette Square.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. YORK: Before NASA got its modern facilities and housing.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes. Well that was a very interesting period of history there, that particular program went from almost nothing to a very large program. So then you continued on as, essentially as assistant secretary in administering a broad variety of research and development.
DR. YORK: Yes, the entire program of the defense establishment.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. YORK: Everything from the development of better shoes for the troops, to tanks, to rockets, to airplanes, to satellite vehicles, to everything…
MR. LARSON: Yes. It must be essentially…
DR. YORK: To cryptology, to everything.
MR. LARSON: …tens of thousands of separate small items from better shoes to…
DR. YORK: Yes, around 80,000.
MR. LARSON: Yes. A fantastic variety there. Well, fine. Then at that particular, let’s see that approaches a transition period politically.
DR. YORK: Yeah. I stayed on very briefly into the Kennedy administration. Bob McNamara invited me to stay on indefinitely, but I had had a heart attack in the fall of 1960 and I really wasn’t sure what my, there were great uncertainties in my life brought about by that, which turned, I had a heart attack, but it did not in fact damage my health and 25 years later I still don’t have any problem, but I didn’t know that at the time. So I, when Kennedy was elected I was already then in the process of trying to figure out what to do next and arranging to go back to the University of California. By the time, before Bob McNamara even asked me to stay on, Clark Kerr who was president of the university asked me if I would be interested in being chancellor at UC San Diego, the new campus. He didn’t actually have the authority to offer me the job, but he could ask me if I was interested. So when Bob invited me to stay on, Bob McNamara, I said I would stay on briefly, but I wanted to get back to California and he said, well he’d like me to stay even briefly, help with the transition and to help in the selection of my successor. So I worked up a list of 13 names the name at the top of the list was Harold Brown and I explained to the Secretary he was at the top of the list because that was the alphabetical order, but in fact he was my favorite. He was my favorite candidate. So, Bob very quickly offered the job to Harold and I came here to San Diego to be chancellor. So then I got out of the defense side of things at least in any intensive way, although I very quickly got involved with arms control because one of Kennedy’s first acts was to set up a special agency housed in the State Department, but reporting to the President called the United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. I was known to be interested in this subject. I hadn’t mentioned it before, but when I was on the President’s Science Advisory Committee I supported the President’s view that there ought to be a test ban and work on technical questions to that end and in the Pentagon I continued to support this view of the President over the opposition of quite a few other, most of the other people in the Pentagon, but I was supporting the President at the time, with regard to Vella and so forth. When the new Arms Control Agency was formed and a general advisory committee which had presidential, consisted of people appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate, was established, I became one of the charter members of that, along with George Kistiakowsky and Robbie.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. YORK: The chairman was John J. McCloy, a New York banker and none of the other members were technical except for the ones I named. We had a Jesuit from Creighton University, and we had Roger Blough who was Chairman of the Board from U.S. Steel and we had Ralph McGill who was the editor and publisher of the Atlanta Constitution. A group like that.
MR. LARSON: Yes, a very distinguished group there. it must have been very interesting to work with…
DR. YORK: It was.
MR. LARSON: …the variety of intellectual backgrounds.
DR. YORK: Yeah and we got into the questions of test ban and the questions of strategic arms limitations, the questions of limiting antiballistic missiles very early and we had very rich discussions of those questions, but my main job was then here, setting up, helping to set up this new university and of course science and technology were involved there because this already was strong in science, ocean science, and even before I came, people like Harold Urey were recruited in chemistry, Keith Brookner, Waldo Cohn and others in physics and then it was my job to continue with that particular thrust.
MR. LARSON: So when you arrived, actually, were there, there weren’t students, essentially.
DR. YORK: There were graduate students.
MR. LARSON: They were graduate students at the time you arrived. Essentially you…
DR. YORK: There were no undergraduates until three years later.
MR. LARSON: You had to put together the bricks and mortar as well as the faculty.
DR. YORK: Yes and the faculty, other than in physics. Physics, chemistry, biology and oceanography were well established and had all a momentum of their own. I was involved in the establishment of mathematics and engineering, psychology and the social sciences, humanities, literature, philosophy and so forth.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes. Of course it grew to be a very large institution.
DR. YORK: I think to be modest about it, it’s the best, most successful of the post-war institutions.
MR. LARSON: Yes, of course it has a tremendous reputation in that way.
DR. YORK: But, I stepped down as chancellor after, less than four years and became, lived here and became re-involved more intensively in Washington national security affairs. I rejoined the President’s Science Advisory Committee, continued with the general committee on arms control, and became a member of the board, both of the Air and Space Corporation and the Institute for Defense Analysis.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. YORK: Worked with the Jason Group in the summer. So although I was here at the university, at least half of my intellectual effort was the technology that goes with defense.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes. So that occupied at least half of your attention as you say.
DR. YORK: When Carter became president, he appointed Harold Brown as Secretary of Defense and since Harold had been my assistant for so many years before and we had kept close contact with each other after he replaced me in the Pentagon, I showed up on his door step without being asked to see what I could do to help out. I did a lot of consulting for him and then joined, but he knew I was particularly interested in arms control in those days and so he made me his representative on the negotiations whose purpose was to try to stop the development of anti-satellites in ’78-’79, ’77-’78. They did not get very far. The Russians at first were not even, the Russians at first professed not to understand why one would want to banish anti-satellites. They thought, they made a, not a strong case, but a case for why a country might want to have them. They were willing to discuss what the equivalent to the rules of the road, non-interference and things like that, but they were not willing to discuss the actual banning or elimination of anti-satellite devices. They said we might need them against a third country.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. YORK: After doing that for about two years and also I was involved in studying questions of the B-1 bomber and air launch cruise missiles and things like that. The new purging’s. I got involved, suddenly, and this was mainly Harold’s doing, but I was, his suggestion, I became the chief negotiator for the test ban negotiations.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. YORK: I suddenly found myself with the title of ambassador and over there in Geneva, negotiating with the Russians and the British, attempting to work out a treaty which would ban the testing of nuclear weapons totally.
MR. LARSON: That would be the comprehensive test ban.
DR. YORK: Yes. We had a limited test ban since 1963. I was on the general advisory committee when that was being worked out. I didn’t have a great deal to do with it, but I was an insider, but not on a full time basis. I testified in favor of it when it came before the Congress, but in the case of the comprehensive test ban I was the chief negotiator, a very different position.
MR. LARSON: What was the outcome of that particular negotiation?
DR. YORK: The outcome was that we got 90 percent of the basic principles worked out, which you would have to work out, maybe even more than 90 percent, but only about half of the details. When we, a variety of external events brought us almost to a virtual halt, and then the election of Reagan brought us to a total halt, but we were dead in the water long before Reagan was elected.
MR. LARSON: Well of course there was Afghanistan.
DR. YORK: It was just as important at people forget it was the tar Haran affair. See although there may not seem to be a logical connection between the embassy and tar Haran and the comprehensive nuclear test ban, there is.
MR. LARSON: Would you clarify that please?
DR. YORK: There is a powerful connection because the controversial test ban, like almost everything with arms control, is very controversial within the American government. There are forces with very different views vying with each other for control of the process. The Department of Energy and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were opposed to a comprehensive test ban. Well when the Iranians captured the American embassy that simply froze the American government. It was no longer possible to handle any kind of controversial issue that didn’t involve what was going on in Iran. So that the, it became impossible to get any kind of useful instructions out of Washington as soon as the embassy was captured.
MR. LARSON: Well that was amazing how an incident like that unrelated on the surface, would immobilize our country like that.
DR. YORK: But it did. It would not have immobilized it if it hadn’t been controversial. See, if we had good instructions and we had the capability of moving ahead as negotiations proceeded of responding to the Russians without making every small response a huge federal case, we would have been able to go ahead. But because the whole thing was so controversial everything we wanted to do that would move the negotiations forward, either the Department of Energy of the Joint Chiefs would say you can’t do that. That’s much too important an issue. That has to be discussed at the Cabinet and there was not the slightest chance in the world of ever getting the Cabinet to discuss anything. So it was the simplest of all bureaucratic maneuvers. Those bureaucrats who don’t want any progress can always stop it by saying that question has to be studied and it was impossible to study the most trivial question at that time. So it was the combination of the fact that it was controversial and the controversies could only be settled at the highest level that brought it to a halt. Then of course there was the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. And we went back to Geneva in the spring of, January of 1960 with the instructions to go slowly, proceed slowly and not to, minimal fraternization so that we could still have business lunches with the Russians, but we couldn’t have cocktail receptions for them.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes. They seem to be a small thing, but distinct.
DR. YORK: It didn’t stop us from talking; in fact it interfered with the lower levels of the delegations. There was no problem for me to talk with my opposite member, or even one layer down, my deputy to talk with his opposite member, but the other people in the delegation at the next level depended on these receptions and things like that to have most of their chances to talk with their opposite members and they were cut off.
MR. LARSON: That’s a very interesting sidelight on history, the interactions of all of these things. It must have been very exciting of you to participate in these global issues at that time.
DR. YORK: Yeah it was.
MR. LARSON: Well of course then you were just about reaching another change in so far as the political situation is concerned. The reelection of…
DR. YORK: This one a bigger change altogether, the change from Carter to Reagan was, all changes of Presidents are pretty dramatic, but this one was much more so than any other that I know about. So it’s all of those, my connections with the government all stopped with the top levels of the government stopped just absolutely. I maintain still to this day a close connection with the American defense program however, through the fact that I am still a member of the trustees of the Air and Space Corporation and the Institute for Defense Analysis.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. YORK: So that I am still involved in that way in all of the things that are happening. And then here at the university quite separate from that, but obviously closely related, I have this new institute that deals with peace and security studies as one element of that we have a research contract here at San Diego to study the political and strategic implications of the Strategic Defense Initiative, Star Wars.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes. Now that’s sponsored as a part of the university system, or…
DR. YORK: The institute is sponsored mainly by the regents of the University of California and the State of California, each of them separately, as part, as a multi-campus activity within the University of California. This research grant, the Star Wars issue is actually an outside grant from the Carnegie Corporation.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes. So that, and that occupies I suppose because of its very nature and controversy, occupies a good fraction of your attention, and thought at this particular time.
DR. YORK: Right. I find it both very interesting and also very difficult.
MR. LARSON: Yes. It must be very difficult the, it’s one of these things in which the facts and the semantics and the emotions all confuse things so much as it’s almost hard to get a rational discussion, much less an understanding.
DR. YORK: The technical issues all involve the future course of technology because the issue, virtually everyone has agreed that nobody knows how to build these systems today, so the question is could you build them, what do you do now in order to build them in 20 or 30 years. Then beyond that the issue is even if you could do it is it a good idea, and then beyond that are a whole lot of issues that are not, which are kind of behind the scenes, but are important having to do with how this whole thing came about. The fact that it was done by White House fiat and that Edward Teller was personally importantly involved, I don’t think he’s the main reason, but he’s importantly involved, he’s created, has exacerbated what controversy there is, so that many of the attitudes I would say attitudes which are basically right are heavily colored by the fact that the people who hold them, you know, have very strong negative views of both Reagan and Teller.
MR. LARSON: Yes of course, it’s a real…
DR. YORK: To the point of hatred in many cases.
MR. LARSON: It’s a real problem of misunderstandings, emotions and so it’s hard to sort out purely scientific facts and the other aspects of this thing.
DR. YORK: But it is very interesting and I have many fingers in that particular pot.
MR. LARSON: So with, then right on the forefront of one of the most important studies and decisions that are going to be made in the next four or five years.
DR. YORK: My most interesting connections are not the academic ones, but in fact the ones I have through IDA and Air and Space, both of which are very much involved in the program.
MR. LARSON: Yeah, so…
DR. YORK: But the one we have here, it’s easy to talk about and involves friends and colleagues here on the campus and adds a great deal of interest to the whole thing.
MR. LARSON: Fine. Well this has been a fascinating exposition of the number and diversity of things that you have been involved in all of your life and I think it has given us a good comprehensive view of these things as much as we can do in this limited time. I was wondering if there were any other things that you think back now that we may not have covered at this time.
DR. YORK: Well I think we probably did pretty well. I will want a copy of the tape myself.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. YORK: I have an archive here on campus.
MR. LARSON: Well, very good then. I think this has been a very valuable addition to our archival collection and I want to thank you Herb for your time and patience in giving us all of this information.
[End of Interview]